Susie Meserve Borealis Drought-dry afternoon, just past two, California sun licking at shadows, I paused by the door as the Russians do to rest on the suitcase, account for every last thing— passport, tickets, lipstick, suppositories, Valium, Prednisone— before I caught the train, boarded the plane, accepted a little bottle of red from a flight attendant with a British accent, and I was dreaming of being at home with my husband and son, not on a solo journey to claim one last embryo from Europe, when the woman in the middle seat jostled my arm and gasped look— —and…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Hannah Faith Notess Viviparity I watched my body fail silently as if from a great distance. Time to admit those months I hadn’t created anything of note, I was just existing like the mammal that I am damp and diurnal, doing its ritual. Just read anybody’s birth story online. There was pain and blood and probably beeping but I wanted to be more than a vessel. Also I wanted to be less than a vessel. I wanted to be the monitor at the back of the room, beeping regularly, the screen no one was watching. I wanted what everyone…
Dayna Patterson Groundhog Day It’s Groundhog Day, again, and so: grandmother’s birthday, Candlemas, 2/2, my youngest child’s original due date. She surprised us by arriving a month early, yellowish, as if her skin had been rubbed all over with dandelions. Pink and polleny. Dent de lion, French for lion’s tooth. Grundsau, Pennsylvania Dutch for groundhog. Every year, I watch the movie: Phil Connors, the weatherman, living the same day on repeat, stuck in eternal winter. Long ago, in Germany, villagers watched for the bear’s emerging. If he stayed out of his hole, they knew it would be an early spring.…
Lisa Ludden Perry Blue Hours, the NICU -After and grateful for “Blue Hour” by Carolyn Forché Time is a clutching longing. Breathing deep into my hands like breath on a cold day, I saw something close to breath assembled, a body constructing itself—you. Your form, sudden, slight, underdeveloped, unfinished—what does it mean to be a finished body? Are we ever more than clusters of air and cells? Air, clutched like a fist, molecules sifting through fingers, circling this concrete blue of a room, meandering blue, this pause in time. A pump thrusts your chest up. Hold. Drop. Scrape. Monitors…
Jasmine Soria Sears Personalized It is strange to be condescended to By someone smaller and younger Smiling up at your concerns Repeating the standard protocols As though your history of quick births And painless labors And late-breaking waters Gives no hint of what’s to come How early can I go to the hospital, you ask again But she just repeats the 5-1-1 definition Emphasizing that contractions are only real When you can’t walk or talk Last time, I walked until I started pushing. She gives another blank smile And another lecture on calling her office—not the hospital— If you…
Leonore Wilson Their Genesis Fog swaddles the pastures, a white film, slub silk like the creamy net vernix that once covered my sons as I cover them now, mature men who sleep with their loves in front of the fire where the wet jaggy boughs have bled to ash; how I want them to stay soft-lunged, flecked with insoluble brilliance on this Christmas dawn; oh what I would do to keep everyone lulled by quiet, as I light a candle like a high-masted thing and perch on the compound steps, staring out over the fertile patch of my living…
Review by Rebecca Jane wolves in shells rewilds the experience of reading poetry. This collection achieves narrative justice for battered women, abandoned women, wolves hunted as game, and domestic experience. Here, language repositions spaces we dwell in to alter what we call home—empty pockets, empty mouths. “We survive by what we do and do not nurture, / and sometimes this requires teeth” (40). What happens to soft flesh when wolves are reintroduced from Canada to Yellowstone Park only to become prey of sport hunters? In a parallel narrative, what happens to a woman’s soft heart when an abusive father…
Famished: On food, sex, and growing up as a good girl by Anna Rollins Review by Melanie McGehee In Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, Anna Rollins examines the influences of purity culture and diet culture. Combining a personal narrative rooted in fundamentalist Christianity with psychological research and interviews, Rollins reveals a larger pattern, which she states near the end of her preface: when women worked to heal from body shame, their relationship to religion was intricately involved. The book opens with two scenes separated by fifteen years. In the first, a teenage Rollins worries…
MER 24 Launch Reading I Sunday June 7th at 3 PM EDT on Zoom (Video coming soon to our YouTube channel). Hosted by Cindy Veach and Carla Panciera Featured Readers a. adenike phillips Amanda Brush Amy Asherah Brandel France de Bravo Brittany N. Jaekel Caedra Scott-Flaherty Carlin Katz Chloe Yelena Miller Connie Post Erin Murphy H.E. Fisher Heidi Seaborn Jean Monahan Jeanne-Marie Fleming Jen Karetnick Jennifer Franklin Judy Ireland Lynn Pedersen Martha Pitts Megan Peak Merna Dyer Skinner Michelle D. Parrish Michelle Lizet Flores Onna Solomon Pichchenda Bao Rachel Becker Ruth Hoberman Suzanne Edison Free and open to the public.
MER 24 Launch Reading II Tues June 16th at 6 PM EDT on Zoom Hosted by Cindy Veach and Carla Panciera Featured Readers Abigail Wender Amy Barnes Dayna Patterson Iquo DianaAbasi Jennifer Jean Jo Ann Clark Jules Foshee Julie Kane Kashiana Singh Kathy Nelson LaToya Winslow Leila Farjami Lesley Wheeler Leslie Johnson Lisa DeSiro Maria Gillan Nancy Carolyn Kwant Rachelle Parker Robin Reagler Sarah Browning Shinelle L. Espaillat Susan Landgraf Susan Rich Tina Carlson Virginia LeBaron Wendy Drexler Free and open to the public.